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Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 2 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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maz1b ◴[12 Nov 20 02:16 UTC] No.25065664[source]▶
This is pretty crazy to see, even if the full story isn't clear yet. A base level MacBook Air is taking the crown of the best MacBook Pro. Wow. SVP Johny Srouji and all of the Apple hardware + silicon team have been smashing it for the past many years.

For what it's worth, I have a fully specced out 16 inch MacBook Pro with the AMD Radeon Pro 5600m and even with that I'm regularly hitting 100% usage of the card, and not to mention the fan noise.

Looking forward to a version from Apple that is made for actual professionals, but I imagine these introductory M1 based devices are going to be great for the vast majority of people.

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martinald ◴[12 Nov 20 02:45 UTC] No.25065838[source]▶
Surely a version that can beat a 8 core Xeon is made for 'actual professionals'?
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sliken ◴[12 Nov 20 02:50 UTC] No.25065866[source]▶
Dunno, seems like most professionals would want to use docker, virtual machines, or enough video/data to want more than 16GB ram. Or maybe even plug in more than a charging cable and one more device. Or run more than one external monitor.

Doesn't seem very "pro" to me. The MBP16" intel has 4 x USB-c ports, can drive two monitors, and can have >= 32GB ram.

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grecy ◴[12 Nov 20 04:35 UTC] No.25066490[source]▶
> most professionals would want to use docker, virtual machines, or enough video/data to want more than 16GB ram

I'm a Sofwware Engineer / pro photographer / videographer.

I sling code from time to time, edit thousands of RAW files from my cameras and edit together 1080p footage day in and day out.

I did that for years on a 2013 MBA with 8GB of RAM. Now I have a 2015 MBP with 16GB of RAM. It's perfectly adequate.

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syas ◴[12 Nov 20 08:23 UTC] No.25067690{3}[source]▶
Yep. My new work laptop only has 16GB of RAM and it’s never been an issue. I’m usually running half a dozen containers, VS Code, Slack, Brave/Chrome, and a few other things. Maybe our work loads are just computationally lighter than some?

I ordered a 16GB Pro the other day to be my personal dev machine. I’m sure it’ll be more than fine. I’m upgrading from a 2013 8GB Pro which was only just starting to slow me down.

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1. BluePen8 ◴[12 Nov 20 10:28 UTC] No.25068426{4}[source]▶
The code and compilation for me is the light part, and for the most part an hour's worth of essentially text editing for about a moment of compilation anyways.

My resource hogs are slack, mainly the browser, and Zoom calls are apparently the most computationally intensive thing in the world, especially if you screen share while you have an external plugged in.

Memory wise the reason I had to go from 8Gb to 16GB on my personal laptop was literally just for TravisCI.

Honestly, adding external monitors cripples MacBooks pretty quick, even unscaled 2 2k monitors will slow a 2015 15 down significantly (don't try and leave YouTube on either), and it gets worse from there once you start upgrading to 4k monitors. a 2017 15 is good for a 4k and a 2k, and gets a bit slow if you try and go dual 4k.

I planned on looking into eGPU solutions until IT offered me a new Macbook, and I convinced them I needed a 16" Pro.

tldr: External monitors or badly optimized applications (Zoom, YouTube, or browser based CI) will make most MacBooks feel sluggish pretty quick.

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2. Joeri ◴[12 Nov 20 15:42 UTC] No.25071013[source]▶
Are those displays in scaled mode? Scaled displays tend to perform badly on integrated graphics, and suck up memory, because it has to render a 2x or 3x size internally and then scale down for every frame. Running something that updates the screen constantly, like zoom, probably exacerbates that issue.